The New York Times focuses on Elyria to tell middle America's story

The New York Times sent a reporter to Elyria to produce a package of stories that purport to tell the nation what things are like in the middle of America, during a tepid recovery.

You can get a flavor of the somewhat overwrought nature of the stories from this introduction: “The dateline is Elyria, Ohio, a city of 55,000 about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland. You know this town, even if you have never been here. A place buffeted by time and the economy, a place where the expectations have been lowered, but not hopes for better days to come. A place where politicians, in this election year, say the American dream is still possible.”

The first story in the package is about Donna Dove, 57, the owner of Donna's Diner.

“You know this place: It is Elyria's equivalent to that diner, that coffee shop, that McDonald's. From the vantage point of these booths and Formica countertops, the past improves with distance, the present keeps piling on, and a promising future is practically willed by the resilient patrons,” the newspaper says.

Ms. Dove came to own the businesses through a piece of serendipity, when 12 years ago she noticed that a local mom-and-pop restaurant was for sale.

“After cooking for her broken family as a child, after cooking for county inmates at one of her many jobs, she had come to see food as life's binding agent, and a diner as her calling,” the story notes. “She maxed out her credit cards, cashed in her 401(k) and opened a business to call her own.”

The piece lays out in heavy detail — often quite affectingly — how Ms. Dove copes with the challenge of running a small business in a rough economy. If you think small business owners have it made, this piece will disabuse you of that notion pretty quickly.

The second story in the package follows Elyria Mayor Holly Brinda as she manages a city where the budget keeps tightening.

She comes across as upbeat, yet realistic, about the task at hand. And she knows she's hardly the only mayor facing these issues.

“We're a small window into the opportunities and struggles of all people across the country,” Mayor Brinda tells The Times.

When economists attack

There's a bit of an academic brawl going on in the world of economists today, kicked off in part by work from a Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland economist.

The Wall Street Journal notes that conventional wisdom on the economy during the Obama years has been shaped to a large degree by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, authors of a book called “This Time Is Different.” They studied 224 banking crises spread out over several centuries and across different countries “and found that recoveries after a financial shock tend to be tepid, with financial institutions and government budget emerging from the crisis strained,” according to the blog post.

Of late, though, top economic advisers to Mitt Romney have seized on work from Rutgers University economic historian Michael Bordo and Cleveland Fed economist Joseph Haubrich, who studied U.S. recessions going back to 1882 “and found that U.S. recoveries following financial shocks tend to be rapid.” Their research “has taken issue with the Reinhart and Rogoff studies, arguing, among other things, that U.S. crises can't be likened to financial crises that have happened elsewhere in the world — such as small developing markets – because their economic institutions are so different,” The Journal says.

Now, the Reinhart/Rogoff team is fighting back with a short paper that critiques the Bordo/Haurbrich work.

“One of their main arguments is that the Bordo work includes borderline financial shocks which weren't full blown crises,” The Journal says. “Reinhart and Rogoff argue that if the paper focused on the four full blown U.S. crises of the past 150 years — in 1873, 1893, 1907 and the 1930s — they would get results similar to the broad swath of international crises the Harvard professors examined.”

In short, they're sticking with the original thesis by declaring, “The recovery process from severe financial crisis is more protracted than from a normal recession or from milder forms of financial distress.”

Better start saving

We've known for a long time that college costs are out of control, but that doesn't diminish the shock of this list of the sticker prices of the country's 100 most expensive schools for the 2012-13 academic year.

CampusGrotto.com ranks schools with a “total costs” comprising tuition, room and board, and required fees. (The website does not attempt, though, to find out what percentage of students actually pay that list price.)

Two Northeast Ohio schools are in the top 100: Oberlin College, at No. 25, with a total cost of $57,025, and Case Western Reserve University, at No. 100, with a total cost of $52,926.

The most expensive school in the country is Sarah Lawrence College, where, without discounts, a year will set you back $61,236.

China syndrome

Northeast Ohio is the center of a targeted ad war, waged by both the Obama and Romney campaigns, about China's role in the world economy.

Bloomberg notes that both campaigns are airing China-themed ads in just Ohio — primarily in Cleveland and Youngstown — and Virginia.

President Barack Obama's re-election campaign has aired a TV commercial “that touted the tariffs his administration slapped on Chinese tires three years ago,” Bloomberg notes. The ad didn't run in Ohio's capital, Columbus, or the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, where the local economies are more advanced and diversified.

Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the same markets is running an ad in which he pledges to “stand up to the cheaters” in China. The ads “underscore the prevalence of an anti-China message by both candidates amid public distrust of the world's most populous nation and second-biggest economy,” according to Bloomberg.

The news service says placement of the commercials demonstrate how each camp is using targeted pitches to influence segments of voters who may determine the White House winner.

In Ohio, for instance, the anti-China campaign “doesn't have to mean” that residents “broadly feel that way,” Herb Asher, a political scientist at Ohio State University, tells Bloomberg. “All these ads are trying to do is to slice off a percentage point or two here and there. It's such a close race in Ohio that anything that might convince a few voters is being tried by the campaigns.”

The piece notes that Mr. Romney has run five China-related spots nearly 8,000 times in Ohio, while the Obama campaign has aired three such spots more than 3,700 times.

“Foreign trade is a big issue in Ohio, particularly in northeastern Ohio,” says John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron. “There's a widespread perception that the United States has lost lots of jobs abroad, including to China.”